Lonnie Jung: And what do you sacrifice?
Luthen: Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts.
I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion, I’m damned for what I do.
My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.
What is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see!
And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything!
In Star Wars Andor, a small group of disconnected individuals begins plotting and carrying out what becomes the rebellion against the Galactic Empire. One leader of this movement, Luthen Rael, lives a double life on the Imperial capital planet Coruscant. In his public-facing life, he charmingly markets rare antiques to high society types, including to government officials. When he removes his wig, he covertly funds, coordinates, and carries out acts that provoke the Empire to put the boot on people; and tides people into joining the rebellion.
Luthen’s character and the acts that he commits often seem morally questionable. For example, Lonnie Jung, his mole working as an officer in the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB), finds out that the ISB knows in advance about an attack by a significant rebel group. In the same meeting as the dialogue above, Lonnie alerts Luthen to warn the group about the ISB’s trap. Instead of assuring Lonnie that he will warn the group, Luthen says to let them fall into the trap and die. That way, he can keep the ISB unsuspicious about his mole Lonni in their midst. And, several times thereafter, Luthen instigates conflict that lead to Imperial troops brutally suppressing people, such that the rest of the galaxy can witness the Empire’s injustice and sympathize with the rebellion. Even though Luthen causes people including himself to suffer intensely, he believes this serves a broader goal of igniting more people to rebel; and make a sunrise that he’ll never see.1 2
I should say, dear reader, that I hold no desire to be Luthen; nor do I remotely share any of Luthen’s qualities like bravery, master planning, or willingness to sacrifice.3 I also don’t want to wade into debating whether Luthen acted morally (I reject the premise of your trolley problem!!).4 Instead, I want to focus on understanding Luthen sacrificing his “calm, kindness, kinship, love” and “burn[ing] my decency for someone else’s future.” What drives him to sacrifices? Or what drives us to sacrifice? I’d like to cover this in the next few posts.
Some people think that the end of Rogue One symbolizes the sunrise that Luthen talks about. The scrappy group of rebels led by Captain Andor successfully transmits the death star plans to the fleeing rebel fleet just as the Empire uses the death star to incinerate the planet. Andor, trapped on the planet, sees the light from the blast grow brighter and brighter like a sunrise. ↩︎
Meanwhile, the rebels flee with the plans and Darth Vader uses a tractor beam to immobilize their ship. As Vader boards the ship and approaches, cutting down rebel troops standing in his way, the panicked rebels hand pass the plans to other officers jettisoning away in an escaping ship. In the ship, the final recipient Leah Organa receives the plans from an officer who asks what they are. “Hope,” says Leah, as the ship departs, signifying that the immense sacrifice produced hope for the rebel cause. ↩︎
I write this as I indulgently munch on organic popcorn in my dumb mesh gaming chair. ↩︎
Other authors have talked about the uselessness of the trolley problem. We should really ask about the decisions that people make that give rise to peoples’ poor material circumstances! ↩︎